Soraya Abu Naba’a to Present “Collective Individuality” Exhibition on February 11th at the Nader Art Gallery

This is a collection of work about a theme that is experienced day after day but which has been translated into a surreal world, inhabited by faceless beings and geometric figures that personify human experiences. It is a type of painted poetry where each stroke, each centimeter relates a story and the entire work forms part of a living experience.

The forms, the colors, the background become one to transmit a story that could be hidden or lived by many.

The forms, the colors, the background become one to transmit a story that could be hidden or lived by many. Each creature is individual and unique as an individual but shares his life, or her experiences because they need others for their own survival; it is an inevitable dependence.

“Collective Individuality” is just the beginning of a story that attempts to express experiences and sentiments that affect all of us and that exist in all of us as part of our human nature. The links that unite us grow with time among various people. Relationships that have been or will be positive or negative, this balance between good and evil and that which distinguishes each of us from one another. Where day-by-day events are defining our character and affecting our personality, where our response to the world around us resides, the response toward each person we meet during the course of our lives.

Soraya was born on August 23, 1985 in Melbourne, Florida. Starting at the age of 8 years old, she began taking drawing and art classes. When she was 16, she spent the summer in Paris. Upon return, she took an intensive drawing course at Parsons University. Searching for more areas in which to develop her creativity, she took more drawing, painting and art history classes as well as introduction to fashion design courses at the Altos de Chavón School in Santo Domingo. She took an advanced drawing course focusing on the human anatomy in the Altos de Chavón School in Romana in 2006.

Ms. Naba’a has been part of the Paris American Academy for 3 years, having earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. In 2008, she took a sculpture course in the Accademia di Arti, in Florence, Italy.

Each exhibition presented a new challenge for Soraya, a new ambition. In a few short years of study, she developed skills in different drawing and painting techniques. She was like a sponge, inspired by those who went before her and by her own innovative perspective. She experimented with different uses of traditional material and at the same time incorporated, in a certain sense, new artistic techniques. One can say that while she had academic training, she also had the freedom to try her own ideas. Her drawings cover the gamut: realistic, nude, still life and landscape. She explored various themes, including the abstract, in her paintings. It was in the latter that she focused her career. She decided to follow and explore the infinite possibilities in the world of imagination where all experiences become a story, where figures with human characteristics tell stories about life.

The Vital World of Soraya

Soraya Abu Naba’a, in a few short years of dedication to drawing, painting and reinterpreting in new compositions and forms, is evolving into an emerging talent we view as positive and promising.

Soraya Abu Naba’a, in a few short years of dedication to drawing, painting and reinterpreting in new compositions and forms, is evolving into an emerging talent we view as positive and promising.

Her work is the result of a creative act and a personal attitude. Both elements evolve to take shape in one work of art then to another and from one period to another. It is the way this young artist tends to modify or radically change her expression, on the road from one defining identity.

Soraya has distanced herself from the traditional figurative painters although she could easily return to use lines, modulations and circles were it necessary. What attracted out attention was the defiant way she approached drawing and painting while maintaining the exigencies of its rigorous form in a clean and straightforward fashion.

Although she went from drawing to painting, her graphic compositions are not preparatory studies but rather painstakingly done with an esthetic and conceptual self-sufficiency. In terms of the pictorial part of her current work, she is introducing colors and other structural components of different formats, combining sensitive geometry and formal gracefulness. Perhaps these are the premises for her next level of creativity.

We note how the artist organizes the collection in a base of one or various signs including the details, like a game of tracing and drawing, of curves and circles that take over the space in an uncontrollable spin of the wheel. Beyond the borders of the paper or canvas, beyond the image of the artist, beyond the imagination of the viewer, the ascending movement continues, the rhythms continue building the vital world of Soraya Abu Naba’a.

Ideas? Surrealism? Abstractionism? We recall the words of Theo Van Doesburg who said that “nothing is more real than a line” and that he preferred the word “concrete” rather than abstraction. Soraya has a particular idiosyncrasy which is real as well as and concrete in its extreme attention to detail and in her own demonstration of being as laborious as she is refined and precise and delicate.

Marianne de Tolentino
ADCA /AICA

• 2005 Group show in Paris American Academy, Paris, France
  
• 2006 Group show in Paris American Academy in Paris, France
  
• 2007 35 Anniversary Celebration of the Nader Art Gallery, Santo Domingo, D.R.
  
• 2007 Individual “GENETIKOS” Paris American Academy in Paris, France
  
• 2007 ARWI, San Juan, Puerto Rico
  
• 2007 Association of Caribbean States, Trinidad and Tobago
  
• 2007 II Biennial of Cándido Bidó in Bonao, D.R.
  
• 2008 Individual “Rizoma” Nader Art Gallery, Santo Domingo, D.R.
  
• 2008 Summer Exhibition, Margarita Gómez Store, Santo Domingo, D.R.
  
• 2008 Shanghai Art Fair, Latin American Pavilion, Shanghai, China
  
• 2008 Hispanic Heritage, Gary Nader Fine Arts, Miami, USA
  
• 2008 XXII Concourse E. León Jimenes, Santiago, D.R.
  
• 2008 Expo@ LED, LED, Santo Domingo, D.R.
  
• 2008 International Exhibition, Nader Art Gallery, Santo Domingo, D.R.
  
• 2008 The Grand Show, Gary Nader Fine Arts Gallery, Miami, USA